Once upon a time (when I was four years old), I was deeply concerned with the question of who is stronger a lion or a tiger? Notice, I did not allow conditional answers like "well it depends on what kind of tiger and what kind of lion". The answer I yearned for was a categorically accurate "lion or a tiger?" Although I pretended to be impartial, secretly, I still hoped that the lion was stronger, for he is the king of beasts, isn’t it?

Years passed; I began to occupy myself with other questions. It seemed I forgot about this childish curiosity. Yet, it turned out that this unanswered question still sits somewhere in the thick creases of my soul.

It so happened that I recently listened to the heated debates on whether LeBron James had achieved the necessary greatness in order to compete in the title of the best player of all time with Michael Jordan himself.

In my opinion, in this case, the subjunctive mood is as irreconcilable as in the application to history. This is just as ungrounded as whether Mike Tyson would have been able to beat Cassius Clay at his peak or Valeri Popenchenko to knock out Marvin Hagler.

At that moment, it occurred to me that, these kinds of questions are the altered questions about the lion and the tiger.

In to purely anthropometric data, the tiger is stronger. He is heavier, has a stronger bite and so on. However, everything depends on what sense we place into the word stronger.

Let's say that we compare a weightlifter with a boxer. A weightlifter can lift a heavier weight. But is that what we mean when we talk about strength? I would say no. When we speak about strength, we mean who will win the fight.

Let's say they met and got into a fight. Who will stay and who will run away, or even be killed? If you look at it from this angle, then we have to consider several options.

Firstly, it depends on the animals that are fighting. There are 7 subspecies of tigers and just as many if not more subspecies of lions.

Besides, it depends on specific individuals. Who had the best father and mother, who created a safer, well-fed life for them?.

Also recall that the tiger is a hunter, while the lion is a warrior. Lions, live in prides where hunter role mostly belongs to females. The task of males is to protect the territory from other males. Lions males often fight among themselves, have an appropriate set of skills, and can afford to sustain wounds. Not because they are bolder than tigers, but because if a lion is wounded, he has the opportunity to survive at the expense of other members of the pride. On the other hand, if a lion will lose in this fight and be expelled from the pride, not only his descendants will be destroyed, but for him it usually means starvation.

The tiger lives alone and hunts all the time to survive. The competition for the territory is much less pronounced. If a tiger runs away from a fight, his descendants are not threatened as it also doesn't mean that he is driven out of his territory. A significant wound, on the other hand, leads to a sure death from hunger.

Therefore, the fight between the lion and the tiger will occur according to two possible scenarios. If a tiger can attack a lion from an ambush, get to his throat and gnaw a carotid artery, then naturally a tiger will win.

However, if both animals see each other, then after a short, struggle, the tiger will most likely run away.

It's a different matter when these animals are kept in a common aviary in the zoo. Here the tiger will not have the opportunity to escape and he will have to take the fight and since he is usually heavier and stronger, he has more chances to win.

But how can this be explained to a four-year-old child who still is waiting for an unequivocally direct answer?